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First thing this morning, we visited the hilltop ruins of the ancient Greeek city of Assos\u00a0(\u00a0\u1f0c\u03c3\u03c3\u03bf\u03c2), which are located near today\u2019s\u00a0Behramkale\u00a0or\u00a0Behram on the Aegean coast in the province of \u00c7anakkale. \u00a0It is on the southern side of the Biga Peninsula, which isbetter known by its ancient name of \u201cthe Troad.\u201d\u00a0 Specifically, \u00a0Assos sits on the coast of the Adramyttian Gulf (in Turkish, the Edremit K\u00f6rfezi)<\/p>\n
During the period of the town\u2019s greatest flourishing, Hermias of Atarneus, a student of Plato, ruled not only Assos and the Troad\u00a0but the island of Lesbos. Consistent with his educational background, Hermias encouraged scholars and philosophers to move to the city.\u00a0 One of those who accepted his invitation was Aristotle,<\/strong>\u00a0who arrived in 348\u00a0BC and, in fact, married Hermias\u2019s niece, Pythia. \u00a0Aristotle founded an Academy in Assos where he became chief amongst a group of philosophers and, with them, began a program of zoological and biological research.\u00a0 Unfortunate, those good things came to an end a few years later when the Persians invaded and tortured Hermias to death. \u00a0Aristotle fled to Macedonia, which was ruled by his friend King Philipp II of Macedon, the father of the future Alexander the Great.\u00a0 In Macedonia, Aristotle became the tutor to Alexander. \u00a0A modern statue of Aristotle stands at the entrance to Assos.<\/p>\n The New Testament book of Acts mentions visits to the city by both its narrator, Luke the Evangelist, and the Apostle Paul:<\/p>\n And we went before to ship, and sailed unto Assos, there intending to take in Paul: for so had he appointed, minding himself to go afoot.\u00a0 And when he met with us at Assos, we took him in, and came to Mitylene.\u00a0 (Acts 20:13-14)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n After leaving Assos, we visited Alexandria Troas, which served as the starting point for the Apostle Paul when he set sail to Europe during his second missionary journey (ca. 50-52 AD). \u00a0Paul had received a vision calling him to Macedonia:<\/p>\n And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas.\u00a0 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.\u00a0 And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.\u00a0 Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis.\u00a0 (Acts 16:8-11)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He also visited the city during his third missionary journey (ca. 53-58 AD). And, later, he spent a week in Troas preaching \u2013 apparently at considerable length:<\/p>\n And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we abode seven days.\u00a0 And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight.\u00a0 And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where they were gathered together.\u00a0 And there sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into a deep sleep: and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.\u00a0 And Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him.\u00a0 When he therefore was come up again, and had broken bread, and eaten, and talked a long while, even till break of day, so he departed.\u00a0 And they brought the young man alive, and were not a little comforted.\u00a0 (Acts 20:6-12)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n By the way, Eutychus<\/em> means \u201cLucky.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve told the story here before, I think, but I\u2019ll repeat it now:\u00a0 I served for very nearly ten years on what was then called the \u201cGospel Doctrine Writing Committee.\u201d\u00a0 It was chaired by the remarkable Richard O. Cowan, of the BYU Department of Church History and Doctrine, and included such people as Kent Jackson and Ann Madsen of Ancient Scripture, Mae Blanch of English, and Clark Johnson of Church History and Doctrine. We produced the adult Sunday School curriculum for the Church at that time.<\/p>\n Our procedure was for each of us to receive an assignment for a particular set of scriptural passages.\u00a0 We would then work at home on producing a lesson on those passages in the prescribed format,.\u00a0 When finished, we would send our lessons to the other members of the committee for their critique.\u00a0 And, roughly twice each month, we would meet early on Sunday mornings for breakfast and for going through the lessons and the critiques, one after another.\u00a0 We would then return home, modify our lessons in the light of comments and critiques, and resubmit them.\u00a0 From that point, they would go up the Church ladder for possible further modification and eventual publication.<\/p>\n During one particular period, I was assigned a number of chapters from the book of Acts, including Acts 20.<\/p>\n It was our occasional practice to insert jokes into our draft lessons (e.g., about \u201cancient American airfields\u201d and the like) for the amusement of other members of the committee.\u00a0 At this particular time, the format in which we were asked to write permitted only bulleted questions and bundles of questions, preferably with practical \u201clife application.\u201d<\/p>\n So, when I read through my assigned chapters, I naturally thought of the following practical questions:<\/p>\n As I had hoped, the committee laughed.\u00a0 To my amazement, though, nobody took the questions out.\u00a0 I can only imagine that each successive reader thought that the next reader would chuckle and that he would then remove them.\u00a0 So, when the pre-publication galleys came back, that cluster of questions was still there.\u00a0 It had even passed the Correlation Committee.\u00a0 For a few seconds, I faced a staggering moral crisis:\u00a0 I thought that it would be hilarious to see those questions in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Japanese, and Tagalog.\u00a0 In the end, though, I called Church headquarters and suggested that they might want to cut them out.\u00a0 The reaction on the other end of the line was stunned gratitude.\u00a0 I thought fleetingly about requesting a finder\u2019s fee, but decided against doing so.<\/p>\n Our next stop after Alexandria Troas was ancient, quasi-legendary Troy, made imperishably famous in Homer\u2019s epic poems, the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em>. \u00a0For many generations, people had assumed that Homer\u2019s account of the Trojan War was fiction and that Troy never existed \u2014 until the 1860s, when its ruins were found by the rich and eccentric genius Heinrich Schliemann.<\/p>\n The poems of Homer and those influenced by him were fundamentally important to ancient Greece, the Greeks\u2019 closest equivalent to the Hebrew Bible, the foundation upon which all succeeding classical civilization rested. Even today, we remember Achilles, the Cyclops, Hector, Paris, Helen, Odysseus or Ulysses, the Land of the Lotus Eaters, Odysseus\u2019s visit to Hades, the Sirens, the island of Circe, the Trojan horse, the suitors of Penelope.\u00a0 Omero poeta sovrano<\/em>, Dante Alighieri called him (in his 1321 Divina Commedia, Inferno, <\/em>Canto IV, line 88): \u201cHomer, the sovereign poet.\u201d<\/p>\n Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover\u00a0the most beautiful woman in the world<\/a>.\u00a0That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.\u00a0 G.K. Chesterton<\/a>,\u00a0The Everlasting Man<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1925)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We spent a fair amount of time walking around and through the ruins of the multiple levels of ancient Troy \u2013 the site is vastly improved for visitors since we were last here \u2014 and then we drove on to spend the night in Bursa, the original capital of the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n While walking through Troy, a member of our group who was trained at Caltech in both physics (undergraduate) and computer science (doctorate) told me a classic Caltech-style joke that I found very funny: \u00a0Have you, he asked, heard of the unit of measurement called a millihelen? \u00a0No, I replied. \u00a0It\u2019s the amount of power required to launch just one ship.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Posted from Bursa, T\u00fcrkiye<\/p>\n \n<\/p> \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 First thing this morning, we visited the hilltop ruins of the ancient Greeek city of Assos\u00a0(\u00a0\u1f0c\u03c3\u03c3\u03bf\u03c2), which are located near today\u2019s\u00a0Behramkale\u00a0or\u00a0Behram on the Aegean coast in the province of \u00c7anakkale. \u00a0It is on the southern side of the Biga Peninsula, which isbetter known by its ancient name of \u201cthe Troad.\u201d\u00a0 Specifically, \u00a0Assos sits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":102389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36791,35124,36788,35127,36785,26748],"class_list":["post-102386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alexandria-troas","tag-homer","tag-iliad","tag-odyssey","tag-trojan-war","tag-troy"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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